Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff
Department Of Homeland Security Response To Recent Litigation
Release Date: January 29, 2017
For Immediate Release
Office of the Press Secretary
Contact: 202-282-8010
WASHINGTON – The Department of Homeland Security will continue to enforce all of President Trump’s Executive Orders in a manner that ensures the safety and security of the American people. President Trump’s Executive Orders remain in place—prohibited travel will remain prohibited, and the U.S. government retains its right to revoke visas at any time if required for national security or public safety. President Trump’s Executive Order affects a minor portion of international travelers, and is a first step towards reestablishing control over America's borders and national security.
Approximately 80 million international travelers enter the United States every year. Yesterday, less than one percent of the more than 325,000 international air travelers who arrive every day were inconvenienced while enhanced security measures were implemented. These individuals went through enhanced security screenings and are being processed for entry to the United States, consistent with our immigration laws and judicial orders.
The Department of Homeland Security will faithfully execute the immigration laws, and we will treat all of those we encounter humanely and with professionalism. No foreign national in a foreign land, without ties to the United States, has any unfettered right to demand entry into the United States or to demand immigration benefits in the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security will comply with judicial orders; faithfully enforce our immigration laws, and implement President Trump’s Executive Orders to ensure that those entering the United States do not pose a threat to our country or the American people.
JackRiddler » Sun Jan 29, 2017 9:15 am wrote:I suspect they will revise to avoid the green card issue and try to dispense sleeping pills, and that this may have been the calculation all along. Go for the extremest, then appear to compromise keeping 98% of the order.
Horrific Limbo by Trump’s Immigration Order
Judicial stays couldn’t protect everyone detained at U.S. airports.
By Dahlia Lithwick
In the short term, at least some of the plaintiffs detained at airports across the country this past weekend have seen some judicial relief since Saturday night. The two named plaintiffs in the suit filed in New York, Hameed Khalid Darweesh and Haider Sameer Abdulkaleq Alshawi, had been released by Saturday night. The two named plaintiffs in a Massachusetts lawsuit, Mazdak Pourabdollah Tootkaboni and Arghavan Louhghalam, both associate professors at the University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, were also allowed to leave Boston’s Logan Airport Saturday night.
Dahlia Lithwick
Dahlia Lithwick writes about the courts and the law for Slate, and hosts the podcast Amicus.
But that isn’t the case for Tareq Aqel Mohammed Aziz and Ammar Aqel Mohammed Aziz. The two young men, citizens of Yemen and lawful holders of U.S. green cards, were refused entry to the United States at Dulles Airport on Saturday, and are now trapped in what their lawyer described as “Tom Hanks limbo” at the Addis Ababa airport in Ethiopia.
After President Trump signed his executive order suspending aliens from Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days, lawful immigrants were trapped at airports around the country. Some of them were already on planes when the order went into effect. Between 50 and 60 people were held at Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, detained by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. For most of the day they were forbidden from meeting with their attorneys.
At about 9 p.m. Saturday night, Leonie Brinkema, a federal judge in the Eastern District of Virginia, issued a temporary restraining order that expressly provided the U.S. government must “permit lawyers access to all legal permanent residents being detained at Dulles International Airport.” Despite that order, throughout the evening it was reported that attorneys still hadn’t been let into the areas in which the detainees were being held by CBP. By about 1 a.m. Sunday, it appeared that all but one of the people they were holding had been allowed to enter the country, in part because Sen. Cory Booker went to Dulles at midnight and demanded that he be allowed to communicate with the detainees. That was around the time that Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, legal director of the Legal Aid Justice Center’s Immigrant Advocacy Program, found out that his two clients, the Aziz brothers, had been sent to Addis Ababa. They’re from Yemen.
The Virginia suit, unlike those filed in Seattle and New York and Boston last night, was not an ACLU project. The LAJC is a legal advocacy shop that fights injustice and inequality in the lives of individual Virginians. They do so by way of impact litigation, community organizing, and policy advocacy, working on issues ranging across housing, education, civil rights, immigration, health care, and consumer finance. Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, together with Andrew Pincus and Paul Hughes of Mayer Brown LLP, filed the suit on behalf of the Aziz brothers, who are 19 and 21 years old. The two were stopped at Dulles yesterday, entering the United States from Yemen, on lawful green cards to which they are entitled by their U.S. citizen father.
Reports abound of lawful immigrants who have been turned away, denied access to medication, and prevented from speaking to counsel. The Aziz brothers’ story is particularly stunning because, says Sandoval-Moshenberg, not only were they handcuffed while they were detained by CBP at Dulles, and not only were they turned away and sent to Ethiopia, but they were also made to sign a form, known as the I-407. In doing so, they surrendered their green cards, under the threat of being barred from the U.S. for the next five years if they did not. Sandoval-Moshenberg tells me he couldn’t quite believe the two young men “were straight-up bullied into having their green cards taken away.” They were at no point given copies of any of the documents they had signed.
Chaos on the ground means that you stand a better chance of being admitted if you arrive at Logan Airport than at Dulles.
Sandoval-Moshenberg says he had reached out on Facebook trying to find potential plaintiffs and his inbox filled quickly. “I was getting messages from people all over the world,” he said, “including people who were writing in using the Wi-Fi from their planes. These are people who were lawfully boarding their flights, but as soon as the wheels hit the ground, they were covered by the executive order.”
It’s still not clear what the Department of Homeland Security plans to do about people like the Aziz brothers, who are right now trapped in an airport in a foreign land. Their lawyers have now been advised that security in Ethiopia is currently holding their Yemeni passports, so they cannot return to Yemen. As the weekend’s events were unspooling, no one even knew whether the executive order applied to green cards. As this CNN report notes, “Friday night, DHS arrived at the legal interpretation that the executive order restrictions applying to seven countries—Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Sudan and Yemen—did not apply to people with lawful permanent residence, generally referred to as green card holders. The White House overruled that guidance overnight, according to officials familiar with the rollout.” And then on Sunday morning, Reince Priebus said that the order actually doesn’t apply to people with green cards. It seems that even within the same administration, alternative facts abound.
The DHS posture appears to be that it will continue to enforce the executive order, and also comply with the judicial orders that have been entered. Chaos on the ground means that you stand a better chance of being admitted if you arrive at Logan Airport than at Dulles. And immigration officials have told more than one detainee that if they don’t like their treatment, they should “call Mr. Trump.”
It’s going to be a long and bumpy road before we even begin to get clear on the scope and meaning of Trump’s executive action, and on the stories of the tens of thousands of people who did nothing more than get on an airplane. Lawyers at Dulles on Sunday tell me that CBP is simply refusing to answer any of their questions anymore. The smug cruelty of the DHS statement that “yesterday, less than one percent of the more than 325,000 international air travelers who arrive every day were inconvenienced while enhanced security measures were implemented” transcends belief as applied to actual people left in horrific limbo. For Tareq and Ammar Aziz, the fact that their lawyers scored a big win in Virginia on Saturday night doesn’t change the fact that they are in an airport in Ethiopia today, stranded without passports, and still do not have a home.
Read more in Slate about the Muslim travel ban.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_ ... ation.html
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Trump’s Executive Order on Refugees — Separating Fact from Hysteria fullscreen President Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office, January 23, 2017. (Reuters photo: Kevin Lamarque) Share article on Facebook share Tweet article tweet Plus one article on Google Plus +1 Print Article Adjust font size AA by David French January 28, 2017 5:32 PM @DavidAFrench The hysterical rhetoric about President Trump’s executive order on refugees is out of control. Let’s slow down and take a look at the facts. To read the online commentary, one would think that President Trump just fundamentally corrupted the American character. You would think that the executive order on refugees he signed yesterday betrayed America’s Founding ideals. You might even think he banned people from an entire faith from American shores. Just look at the rhetoric. Here’s Chuck Schumer: If you thought only Senator Schumer saw tears in Lady Liberty’s eyes, think again. Here’s Nancy Pelosi: CNN, doing its best Huffington Post impersonation, ran a headline declaring “Trump bans 134,000,000 from the U.S.” The Huffington Post, outdoing itself, just put the Statue of Liberty upside down on its front page. So, what did Trump do? Did he implement his promised Muslim ban? No, far from it. He backed down dramatically from his campaign promises and instead signed an executive order dominated mainly by moderate refugee restrictions and temporary provisions aimed directly at limiting immigration from jihadist conflict zones.
Let’s analyze the key provisions, separate the fact from the hysteria, and introduce just a bit of historical perspective.
First, the order temporarily halts refugee admissions for 120 days to improve the vetting process, then caps refugee admissions at 50,000 per year. Outrageous, right? Not so fast. Before 2016, when Obama dramatically ramped up refugee admissions, Trump’s 50,000 stands roughly in between a typical year of refugee admissions in George W. Bush’s two terms and a typical year in Obama’s two terms. The chart below, from the Migration Policy Institute, is instructive:
In 2002, the United States admitted only 27,131 refugees. It admitted fewer than 50,000 in 2003, 2006, and 2007. As for President Obama, he was slightly more generous than President Bush, but his refugee cap from 2013 to 2015 was a mere 70,000, and in 2011 and 2012 he admitted barely more than 50,000 refugees himself.
The bottom line is that Trump is improving security screening and intends to admit refugees at close to the average rate of the 15 years before Obama’s dramatic expansion in 2016. Obama’s expansion was a departure from recent norms, not Trump’s contraction.
Second, the order imposes a temporary, 90-day ban on people entering the U.S. from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. These are countries either torn apart by jihadist violence or under the control of hostile, jihadist governments.
The ban is in place while the Department of Homeland Security determines the “information needed from any country to adjudicate any visa, admission, or other benefit under the INA (adjudications) in order to determine that the individual seeking the benefit is who the individual claims to be and is not a security or public-safety threat.” It could, however, be extended or expanded depending on whether countries are capable of providing the requested information.
The ban, however, contains an important exception: “Secretaries of State and Homeland Security may, on a case-by-case basis, and when in the national interest, issue visas or other immigration benefits to nationals of countries for which visas and benefits are otherwise blocked.” In other words, the secretaries can make exceptions — a provision that would, one hopes, fully allow interpreters and other proven allies to enter the U.S. during the 90-day period.
To the extent this ban applies to new immigrant and non-immigrant entry, this temporary halt (with exceptions) is wise. We know that terrorists are trying to infiltrate the ranks of refugees and other visitors. We know that immigrants from Somalia, for example, have launched jihadist attacks here at home and have sought to leave the U.S. to join ISIS.
Indeed, given the terrible recent track record of completed and attempted terror attacks by Muslim immigrants, it’s clear that our current approach is inadequate to control the threat. Unless we want to simply accept Muslim immigrant terror as a fact of American life, a short-term ban on entry from problematic countries combined with a systematic review of our security procedures is both reasonable and prudent.
However, there are reports that the ban is being applied even to green-card holders. This is madness. The plain language of the order doesn’t apply to legal permanent residents of the U.S., and green-card holders have been through round after round of vetting and security checks. The administration should intervene, immediately, to stop misapplication. If, however, the Trump administration continues to apply the order to legal permanent residents, it should indeed be condemned.
Third, Trump’s order also puts an indefinite hold on admission of Syrian refugees to the United States “until such time as I have determined that sufficient changes have been made to the USRAP to ensure that admission of Syrian refugees is consistent with the national interest.” This is perhaps the least consequential aspect of his order — and is largely a return to the Obama administration’s practices from 2011 to 2014. For all the Democrats’ wailing and gnashing of teeth, until 2016 the Obama administration had already largely slammed the door on Syrian-refugee admissions.
The Syrian Civil War touched off in 2011. Here are the Syrian-refugee admissions to the U.S. until Obama decided to admit more than 13,000 in 2016:
Fiscal Year 2011: 29
Fiscal Year 2012: 31
Fiscal Year 2013: 36
Fiscal Year 2014: 105
Fiscal Year 2015: 1,682
To recap: While the Syrian Civil War was raging, ISIS was rising, and refugees were swamping Syria’s neighbors and surging into Europe, the Obama administration let in less than a trickle of refugees. Only in the closing days of his administration did President Obama reverse course — in numbers insufficient to make a dent in the overall crisis, by the way — and now the Democrats have the audacity to tweet out pictures of bleeding Syrian children?
It’s particularly gross to see this display when the Obama administration’s deliberate decision to leave a yawning power vacuum — in part through its Iraq withdrawal and in part through its dithering throughout the Syrian Civil War — exacerbated the refugee crisis in the first place. There was a genocide on Obama’s watch, and his tiny trickle of Syrian refugees hardly makes up for the grotesque negligence of abandoning Iraq and his years-long mishandling of the emerging Syrian crisis.
When we know our enemy is seeking to strike America and its allies through the refugee population, when we know they’ve succeeded in Europe, and when the administration has doubts about our ability to adequately vet the refugees we admit into this nation, a pause is again not just prudent but arguably necessary. It is important that we provide sufficient aid and protection to keep refugees safe and healthy in place, but it is not necessary to bring Syrians to the United States to fulfill our vital moral obligations.
Fourth, there is a puzzling amount of outrage over Trump’s directive to “prioritize refugee claims made by individuals on the basis of religious-based persecution, provided that the religion of the individual is a minority religion in the individual’s country of nationality.” In other words, once refugee admissions resume, members of minority religions may well go to the front of the line. In some countries, this means Christians and Yazidis. In others, it can well mean Muslims.
Sadly, during the Obama administration it seems that Christians and other minorities may well have ended up in the back of the line. For example, when Obama dramatically expanded Syrian refugee admissions in 2016, few Christians made the cut:The Obama administration has resettled 13,210 Syrian refugees into the United States since the beginning of 2016 — an increase of 675 percent over the same 10-month period in 2015.
Of those, 13,100 (99.1 percent) are Muslims — 12,966 Sunnis, 24 Shi’a, and 110 other Muslims — and 77 (0.5 percent) are Christians. Another 24 (0.18 percent) are Yazidis.
As a point of reference, in 2015 Christians represented roughly 10 percent of Syria’s population. Perhaps there’s an innocent explanation for the disparity. Perhaps not. But one thing is clear — federal asylum and refugee law already require a religious test. As my colleague Andy McCarthy has repeatedly pointed out, an alien seeking asylum “must establish that . . . religion [among other things] . . . was or will be at least one central reason for persecuting the applicant.”
Similarly, the term “refugee” means “(A) any person who is outside any country of such person’s nationality . . . and who is unable or unwilling to return to . . . that country because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of . . . religion [among other things] . . . [.]”
But don’t tell CNN’s chief national security correspondent, who last night tweeted this:
xxx
False. False. False. Religious considerations are by law part of refugee policy. And it is entirely reasonable to give preference (though not exclusivity) to members of minority religions.
Finally, you can read the entire executive order from start to finish, reread it, then read it again, and you will not find a Muslim ban. It’s not there. Nowhere. At its most draconian, it temporarily halts entry from jihadist regions. In other words, Trump’s executive order is a dramatic climb-down from his worst campaign rhetoric. You can read the entire executive order from start to finish, reread it, then read it again, and you will not find a Muslim ban. It’s not there. Nowhere.
To be sure, however, the ban is deeply problematic as applied to legal residents of the U.S. and to interpreters and other allies seeking refuge in the United States after demonstrated (and courageous) service to the United States. Twitter timelines are coming alive with stories of Iraqi interpreters who’ve saved American lives. Few have bled more in alliance with America than Iraq’s Kurds, but the order itself provides for the necessary case-by-case exemptions to the temporary blanket bans. It is vital that General John Kelly, the newly confirmed secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, move expeditiously to protect those who’ve laid down their lives in the war against ISIS, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban. Given his own wartime experience, I believe and hope that he will.
Trump’s order was not signed in a vacuum. Look at the Heritage Foundation’s interactive timeline of Islamist terror plots since 9/11. Note the dramatic increase in planned and executed attacks since 2015. Now is not the time for complacency. Now is the time to take a fresh look at our border-control and immigration policies. Trump’s order isn’t a betrayal of American values. Applied correctly and competently, it can represent a promising fresh start and a prelude to new policies that protect our nation while still maintaining American compassion and preserving American friendships.
— David French is a staff writer for National Review, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, and an attorney.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 ... t-hysteria
Trump Visa Denials Target Same Countries Bush Vowed to Overthrow
Posted on Jan 28, 2017
By Juan Cole / Informed Comment
Trump’s shameful halt to the admission of refugees for 6 months and his 3-month pause in allowing entry to the U.S. from seven countries is being advertised as driven by security concerns.
The countries targeted are Syria, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Libya, Sudan, and Yemen.
What is remarkable to me is how much this list resembles the one drawn up by the Bush administration, only in that case Bush intended to overthrow their governments and risk plunging them into instability. Six of the countries are the same, with Bush having planned an overthrow of the Lebanese government, whereas Trump substituted Yemen. It was former NATO commander Gen. Wesley Clark who revealed that Bush had these plans to subject other states to the same tender mercies that left Iraq a basket case.
The similarity in the hit list suggests a fatal inertia across administrations in policy-making. The world situation has changed since 2002. So Iraq is an ally and the U.S. had been admitting nearly 16,000 Iraqi refugees a year with no incident. Obama showed that Iran could be dealt with through negotiations. Trump wants to ally with Putin in Syria, which is a de facto alliance with Syria. Libya is a mess but Gaddafi is gone. The rationale for targeting these countries, militarily or visa-wise would be hard to defend now.
Although Bush got bogged down in Iraq and could not pursue these other overthrows, over time the U.S. military has targeted several in turn. The U.S. overthrew the Iraqi government and plunged it into chaos. The U.S. is probably acting against Iran covertly. It has subjected Somalia and Yemen to drone strikes.
Bush’s plans for regime-change, egged on by the Neoconservatives, faltered during his own presidency. But then in 2011 when the Arab Spring broke out, the Obama administration called for the presidents of Yemen and Syria to step down. Both are still in power, though Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh did step down in 2012; he came back in a coup backed by the Zaydi Shiite Houthi movement. The U.S. has been helping the Saudi government to choose targets for bombing in Sanaa, and has given strategic and logistical help to Saudi Arabia for this war effort. In Syria, President Obama called on Bashar al-Assad to step down, and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency ultimately used the Saudis as a pass-through agency to send money and arms to some of the revolutionary militias that grew up (some of which went rogue or sold their weapons to Daesh [ISIS, ISIL]).
I don’t personally think Obama’s actions in Libya resembled those planned by the Bush administration. The former was faced with a genuine national uprising and there is a question about whether the carnage would have been even worse if Moammar Gaddafi had been allowed to try to stay in power.
So it seems that the actual situation is the opposite from the one advertised by Trump. These are not countries that pose a danger to the U.S. They are countries to which the U.S poses the risk, of instability and millions of displaced, when the U.S. comes knocking.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tru ... w_20170128
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Zionist Organization of America praises Trump's refugee ban on grounds that unlike Jews in 1930s, Muslims are bad. http://zoa.org/2017/01/10350638-zoa-pra ... errorists/ …
Retweets 148 Likes 89
5:31 AM - 28 Jan 2017
ZOA is appalled that leftwing Jewish groups are wrongly analogizing this humane, reasonable, security-based draft Executive Order to U.S. restrictions in the 1930s on Jewish refugees fleeing from Nazi Germany.
Read more: http://zoa.org/2017/01/10350638-zoa-pra ... z4XBuTS9GE
seemslikeadream » Sun Jan 29, 2017 1:58 pm wrote:yes they are prepping
they have been prepping....MIHOP trumpty dumpty style
I'm waiting for Europe to read trumpty the riot act
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